After sleeping on it, I’d like to raise two problems I have with the last double-update, and see what you guys think.
1. That Harry would be able to cast Partial Transfiguration in those circumstances does not seem clearly and unambiguously established by the story so far.
(unless I’m missing something, in which case please point it out to me.)
I’m not saying it’s wrong that he was able to cast it. I’m saying that as a reader, I couldn’t know that in advance, and that’s bad for a story.
First we’re told that you can’t transfigure air. And EY repeatedly insists Harry cannot overcome any limitations of magic in 60 seconds, so that felt like a hint not to look for a spellcasting solution, at least not without regaining some freedom of movement first.
We did get an earlier scene where Harry considers the fact that his wand is showing some minor wear and tear, and seems robust against small loss of wood. So yes, that feels like a hint in the other direction, maybe even fairly strong evidence.
But the thing is, magic in Harry Potter universe is arbitrary in so many ways, like that you have to say “Wingardum Leviosa” and not something else if you want to levitate something. HPMoR draws attention to this fact repeatedly. Indeed, Harry is even thinking about the absurdity of it in that scene where he is considering the minor damage to his wand!
AFAIK, you can only transfigure something you’re touching with your wand. Now, does your wand count as something touching your wand? A gun can’t fire at itself. A square in Conway’s Game of Life does not count itself as “adjacent”. Or for a more in-universe example of “don’t act on yourself”: you can’t levitate yourself with Wingardum Leviosa. So I could easily imagine problems with casting spells on your own wand, too. (Or I could imagine intentionally removing matter from the wand causing it to become defective.)
So should transfiguring a piece of your wand have been possible? Nothing clearly says “no”, but it seems the sort of a thing that we wouldn’t know for sure until we saw Harry test it. And, correct me if I’m wrong, we never saw Harry test it.
(Aside: could you partially-transfigure a piece of your hand? Or do you have to be touching the transfigured object with the business end, and not the grip? Again, I don’t know, that’s the point.)
Easy solution: what if, in ch91, when Harry had noticed the accumulating wear on his wand, he’d remembered that he wants to live forever and “a wand would last through a standard lifetime” didn’t feel like sufficient reassurance. So to protect his wand from further wear, he has it painted/covered in a transparent… what’s the word I’m looking for? Fixative? The sort of a wood paint that you use for the wood’s protection. You know what I mean.
Then in chapter 114 he could just transfigure the fixative, which would be clearly in contact with the tip of his wand.
2. The tone feels wrong.
In ch115, the sense of urgency, of deadly threat, of fear, went out like air from a deflated balloon.
Harry should be in Moody-paranoia mode, not in Far Mode Goodness mode. He should be worrying about what could still go wrong, not about what action would be sufficiently nice from the pov of a hypothetical future civilisation. He should be afraid of Voldemort still somehow winning, of all the consequences if he goofs up now. I said it before, but anything other than ruthless pragmatism in that situation feels insane to me.
Remember proper pessimism?
The Dark Lord is alive. Of course he’s alive. It was an act of utter optimism for me to have even dreamed otherwise. I must have taken leave of my senses, I can’t imagine what I was thinking. Just because someone said that his body was found burned to a crisp, I can’t imagine why I would have thought he was dead.
That’s what we needed more of.
Example: Did Harry even bother to properly check that all the Death Eaters were dead, that he didn’t mess any of that up? He seems to pay them little attention, like he’s read the script and knows that this is the part in the story where he wins, so nothing can go fundamentally wrong.
Voldemort is only incapacitated. Harry should be in a hurry, he should be deadly aware of how much he’s gonna get it, if for whatever reasons something should go wrong now. (He does think the thought about how if Voldie awakens, things will get bad, but it feels robotically logical.)
He should have instantly (I mean literally instantly, with the use of the Time Turner) brought Moody upon the scene. For example to check for anyone Disillusioned that Voldemort might have pre-planted at the scene and who was now about to act. Or for any other unforeseen need that could only be handled by an adult, experienced wizard, not someone with Harry’s level of power.
Even if Harry decides he doesn’t need Moody for Cruciatus purposes, still, once he thought of involving Moody for whatever reason, he should have realized that it would be a really, really smart thing to quickly get him involved and query his greater experience at being pessimistic, to make sure every precaution is taken.
But not to lose the forest for the trees: it’s the overall tone that bugs me. HPJEV always felt at risk of being a bit of a marysue, and this completely went away in chapters 104-113, but 115 is one of the offenders. Keeping a sense of urgency and vulnerability would have been good. Harry’s taking the time to look at stars and think about balance and morality and the “children’s children’s children” feels too leisurely, he’s too much the master of the situation, and too much a saint.
I could see that weeks later, in a final chapter, when he’s finally believing on a gut level that the threat is over (and so does the reader). But not now.
I mostly agree with the first part, and it’s an important reason for which I didn’t like the “final exam” concept, there is just too much we don’t really know about how HPMOR world works. It’s fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because we can assume Harry knows more about it than we do (he’s living in it after all, he did read many books about magic, do many experiments, attend to lessons, …) but it’s not fair to ask us to outguess such things.
For the second part, I don’t really agree. Think about the emotional state of Harry. He got through a very very stressy times, and despite all odds, he won. I must be feeling some euphoria for that. And at the same time, he killed dozens fo people. In self-defense, sure. But he, the anti-deathist just killed dozens of people. In such a situation, the mixing of euphoria of winning against all odds and the horror of having just killed, wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It’s exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.
wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It’s exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.
I concede this. I think I just don’t like this part of Harry that much, but that is not the same as saying it’s not in character.
The rest of my point remains, that after all all the pressure built up in the previous 8 chapters, this one is too relaxed and lacking in precautionary thinking.
It’s fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because we can assume Harry knows more about it than we do (he’s living in it after all, he did read many books about magic, do many experiments, attend to lessons, …) but it’s not fair to ask us to outguess such things.
Is it really fine from a storytelling point of view? I suggest that correct storytelling means making solution-relevant rules clear in advance. Like in Death Note, the plot often hinges on how exactly the notebooks work, but these rules—and how much each character knows about them—are made very clear before they become pivotal.
And clearly EY tried to do this, and came close (with the robust-wand thing). I just don’t think it quite worked.
After sleeping on it, I’d like to raise two problems I have with the last double-update, and see what you guys think.
1. That Harry would be able to cast Partial Transfiguration in those circumstances does not seem clearly and unambiguously established by the story so far.
(unless I’m missing something, in which case please point it out to me.)
I’m not saying it’s wrong that he was able to cast it. I’m saying that as a reader, I couldn’t know that in advance, and that’s bad for a story.
First we’re told that you can’t transfigure air. And EY repeatedly insists Harry cannot overcome any limitations of magic in 60 seconds, so that felt like a hint not to look for a spellcasting solution, at least not without regaining some freedom of movement first.
We did get an earlier scene where Harry considers the fact that his wand is showing some minor wear and tear, and seems robust against small loss of wood. So yes, that feels like a hint in the other direction, maybe even fairly strong evidence.
But the thing is, magic in Harry Potter universe is arbitrary in so many ways, like that you have to say “Wingardum Leviosa” and not something else if you want to levitate something. HPMoR draws attention to this fact repeatedly. Indeed, Harry is even thinking about the absurdity of it in that scene where he is considering the minor damage to his wand!
AFAIK, you can only transfigure something you’re touching with your wand. Now, does your wand count as something touching your wand? A gun can’t fire at itself. A square in Conway’s Game of Life does not count itself as “adjacent”. Or for a more in-universe example of “don’t act on yourself”: you can’t levitate yourself with Wingardum Leviosa. So I could easily imagine problems with casting spells on your own wand, too. (Or I could imagine intentionally removing matter from the wand causing it to become defective.)
So should transfiguring a piece of your wand have been possible? Nothing clearly says “no”, but it seems the sort of a thing that we wouldn’t know for sure until we saw Harry test it. And, correct me if I’m wrong, we never saw Harry test it.
(Aside: could you partially-transfigure a piece of your hand? Or do you have to be touching the transfigured object with the business end, and not the grip? Again, I don’t know, that’s the point.)
Easy solution: what if, in ch91, when Harry had noticed the accumulating wear on his wand, he’d remembered that he wants to live forever and “a wand would last through a standard lifetime” didn’t feel like sufficient reassurance. So to protect his wand from further wear, he has it painted/covered in a transparent… what’s the word I’m looking for? Fixative? The sort of a wood paint that you use for the wood’s protection. You know what I mean.
Then in chapter 114 he could just transfigure the fixative, which would be clearly in contact with the tip of his wand.
2. The tone feels wrong.
In ch115, the sense of urgency, of deadly threat, of fear, went out like air from a deflated balloon.
Harry should be in Moody-paranoia mode, not in Far Mode Goodness mode. He should be worrying about what could still go wrong, not about what action would be sufficiently nice from the pov of a hypothetical future civilisation. He should be afraid of Voldemort still somehow winning, of all the consequences if he goofs up now. I said it before, but anything other than ruthless pragmatism in that situation feels insane to me.
Remember proper pessimism?
That’s what we needed more of.
Example: Did Harry even bother to properly check that all the Death Eaters were dead, that he didn’t mess any of that up? He seems to pay them little attention, like he’s read the script and knows that this is the part in the story where he wins, so nothing can go fundamentally wrong.
Voldemort is only incapacitated. Harry should be in a hurry, he should be deadly aware of how much he’s gonna get it, if for whatever reasons something should go wrong now. (He does think the thought about how if Voldie awakens, things will get bad, but it feels robotically logical.)
He should have instantly (I mean literally instantly, with the use of the Time Turner) brought Moody upon the scene. For example to check for anyone Disillusioned that Voldemort might have pre-planted at the scene and who was now about to act. Or for any other unforeseen need that could only be handled by an adult, experienced wizard, not someone with Harry’s level of power.
Even if Harry decides he doesn’t need Moody for Cruciatus purposes, still, once he thought of involving Moody for whatever reason, he should have realized that it would be a really, really smart thing to quickly get him involved and query his greater experience at being pessimistic, to make sure every precaution is taken.
But not to lose the forest for the trees: it’s the overall tone that bugs me. HPJEV always felt at risk of being a bit of a marysue, and this completely went away in chapters 104-113, but 115 is one of the offenders. Keeping a sense of urgency and vulnerability would have been good. Harry’s taking the time to look at stars and think about balance and morality and the “children’s children’s children” feels too leisurely, he’s too much the master of the situation, and too much a saint.
I could see that weeks later, in a final chapter, when he’s finally believing on a gut level that the threat is over (and so does the reader). But not now.
I mostly agree with the first part, and it’s an important reason for which I didn’t like the “final exam” concept, there is just too much we don’t really know about how HPMOR world works. It’s fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because we can assume Harry knows more about it than we do (he’s living in it after all, he did read many books about magic, do many experiments, attend to lessons, …) but it’s not fair to ask us to outguess such things.
For the second part, I don’t really agree. Think about the emotional state of Harry. He got through a very very stressy times, and despite all odds, he won. I must be feeling some euphoria for that. And at the same time, he killed dozens fo people. In self-defense, sure. But he, the anti-deathist just killed dozens of people. In such a situation, the mixing of euphoria of winning against all odds and the horror of having just killed, wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It’s exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.
I concede this. I think I just don’t like this part of Harry that much, but that is not the same as saying it’s not in character.
The rest of my point remains, that after all all the pressure built up in the previous 8 chapters, this one is too relaxed and lacking in precautionary thinking.
Is it really fine from a storytelling point of view? I suggest that correct storytelling means making solution-relevant rules clear in advance. Like in Death Note, the plot often hinges on how exactly the notebooks work, but these rules—and how much each character knows about them—are made very clear before they become pivotal.
And clearly EY tried to do this, and came close (with the robust-wand thing). I just don’t think it quite worked.